My name is Ursula Beiersdorf and I work for Jungheinrich as Test Service Manager in Hamburg in Germany. Before, I have been working for EDS, HP, HPE, DXC and the direkt gruppe for more than 25 years (including a couple of mergers of acquisitions…). Those were great years as they offered me a variety of many different projects with different roles and responsibilities. These all let me grow into a role which I like to call test management and consulting. For me this role includes the responsibility to setup a testing approach for a project and then also to deliver. Lead a team of testers and try to deliver quality work. My projects were usually large, v-model shaped and pretty often spread across different locations, including best shore.
I actually like this role as it includes:
- Discussing with the whole project team (incl. dev lead, project management, operations,..) a meaningful approach for quality and laying the basics
- Understanding the overall picture of the project and the goal to be reached
- Elaborating and teaching the approach to reach the goal
- Managing the team to reach to goal while collaborating with others
- Setting up a tool environment to support the team’s work
So there is a lot of working with others in it. Discussing and competing to reach a common understanding of what is good. Learning of what is needed and could be done. And start early in a project. I also enjoy the power of test management tools to support a large team. I was lucky enough to use different tools here, for example the HPE ALM Suite and the IBM rational suite.
Based on that experience and attitude to achieve a holistic improvement I also had the chance to prove that leading a whole project from a quality perspective delivers great results. While I enjoyed taking that responsibility, I also learned that I prefer being closer to the quality people. My kind of enthusiasm is better suited to impress other quality people. Work is much more fun then.
Obviously with this team attitude I ran across the agile methods, even much earlier than my company got projects where this was requested. So I had to learn this elsewhere. Apart from books and articles I read and trainings I took, I chose two ways: participate in and organize meetups with a group of testers in Hamburg (XING Software Test User Group Hamburg, StugHH) where about 80% agile folks are around. And we have fruitful discussions about anything in testing but also about the organization of test in context. But I am convinced that any kind of learning has to be supported by doing what you learned, so I took an internship at XING in an agile team. Also, since then, I am trying to use as much as possible of the agile mindset, as the project allows. A great example would be to include many of those methods of giving feedback to produ
ct and people even in a more traditionally oriented project. Once in a while I go to conferences on testing. So I guess while I am more traditionally oriented, I feel at home in both worlds.
I love sharing knowledge. This really is a recurring theme in all of my activities. I do this on project level, I organized knowledge sharing sessions with in HPE, trying to bring people together from many different teams, and I strongly support the StugHH, being one of the moderators. I benefit, and others benefit as well.
Being thankful for all the opportunities I have and had a work, I want to give back. One of the means for this is the knowledge sharing. Another means is to help also people outside work. Coaching mathematics in a class of refugees at a local school was my way of trying to give perspectives to not so privileged for some time in 2016/2017.
Finally, a pretty strong part of my personal development was shaped by my family and hobbies. Being a mother of by now 2 grown ups definitely has influence on my leadership style and also made it easier to stay mentally fresh and open minded. Since I was young, I play the Cello in an orchestra and Tenor Sax in a bigband. This is joy and responsibility. Dancing the Tango Argentino makes me sensitive for small impulses. Enjoying my garden and sailing gives me peace at mind. I think, all fits together.
But I guess it is always like in the poem with the blind men and the elephant: whatever part of me you see will give you a different result. And I like it that way.